Holocaust Now: Looking Down Into Hell at Camp 22

Those who have lived to tell us about Camp 22, located in the bleak northeastern tip of North Korea, can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and all of them are former guards or staff. Of all of North Korea’s numerous labor camps and detention facilities, large and small, Camp 22 is one of the largest, and almost certainly the most terrible, if only for the inhuman experiments witnesses say were done to the men, women, children, and even infants sent there.

North Korea’s system of spying, thought-control, isolation, and terror may have no equal in human history. That is how Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il kept the secrets of Camp 22 inside its ten-foot wire fences and distinctive blocky guard posts for decades. That changed when satellite photography went public. Since then, Google Earth has revealed the world’s most secret places to armies of amateur “squints.” Satellite photography was available to the human rights researcher David Hawk when he set to work on “The Hidden Gulag,” his ground-breaking study of North Korea’s forced labor camps. Hawk’s interviews with survivors and former guards alone would not have had the same impact had those witnesses not been able to point to those photographs and say,

“This is the detention center,” he said. “If someone goes inside this building, in three months he will be dead or disabled for life. In this corner they decided about the executions, who to execute and whether to make it public.

“This is the Kim Il Sung institute, a movie house for officers. Here is watchdog training. And guard training ground. Pointing to another spot, he said: “This is the garbage pond where the two kids were killed when guard kicked them in pond.

This also allows us to begin our tour from a base line of more-or-less known fact. Absolute certainty will have to wait for the day when Camp 22 is liberated. For Google Earth newbies, you can download the program here. Each screen grab also shows the scale, coordinates, altitude, and attitude, in case you want to have a look for yourself.

Google Earth’s high-resolution imagery covers less than half of Camp 22, the portion that you will view — and escape — from the warmth and comfort of your home today. As I write this, North Korea has declared four days of celebration for Kim Jong Il’s 65th birthday, and it is just possible that the inmates of Camp 22 will be permitted a few days of rest from the mines and farms there, where the prisoners usually labor 12 or more hours a day, seven days a week.

Camp 22 is said to hold 50,000 men, women, and children. We can only see one portion of the camp with Google Earth’s high-resolution photography.

The yellow scale line to the right of the fence line is just shy of 14 miles. According to “The Hidden Gulag,” the whole camp is 31 miles long by 25 miles wide. That works out to over 700 square miles, but if one makes allowances for the camp’s irregular shape, a rough estimate of 500 square miles seems more likely. That would make it as big as the city of Los Angeles. Where high-resolution photography is available, it’s not hard to see the fence line punctuated at intervals of about 1200 feet by guard posts (below, left), buttressed, in places, by smaller guard shacks like these (below, right).

I couldn’t explain these unusual ditches until I noted this MSNBC report, claiming that the camp is surrounded by “land mines and man-traps.”

It’s impossible to draw any firm conclusion, but these ditches could be “tiger traps” whose coverings have weathered away. It’s certainly hard to imagine what other reason there could be for digging trench lines like this along the fence line of a forced labor camp.

The camp is in a remote area, surrounded mostly by forest. In a few areas, however, just beyond the fence, the lives of North Korea’s peasant farmers, such as they are, go on.

They cannot read foreign newspapers, listen to foreign broadcasts, possess cell phones or radios that can pick up unauthorized broadcasts, express unauthorized opinions, or travel abroad without fear of entering this gate. The state owns everything, including the meager rations they grow, and on which they live. Still, for farmers in North Korea, survival is a little easier than it is for workers in the blighted factory towns where unemployed survivors of the Great Famine still live by stripping the ruins of copper wire. Just the same, one suspects that the farmers know what’s good for them. Most likely, they stay away from the fence, keep their eyes on the soil, and never mention it.

[Update, 4/2007: The camp’s presence is impossible to ignore completely when it intrudes into the lives of those who live near it, of course. While living in Seoul, a Korean-American teacher, Joseph Songhoon Lee, met and taught a defector who had lived just outside the camp’s gate, perhaps near the area imaged above. Lee described the defector’s experiences in a recent article for the Washington Post:

[B] graduated from School 34 a few weeks ago and is studying at Sungkyunkwan University, one of the nation’s top colleges. He grew up a few minutes away from one of North Korea’s most notorious political prisons, Prison 22 in Hyeryung, Ham-Kyung Province, at the northern tip of North Korea. Because food and alcohol are scarce in the countryside, the prison guards went to [B’s] house for libations. “They always drank heavily,” he told me. “And when they got drunk, they would mumble about how sorry they felt for what they did to prisoners.

I redacted information identifying the defector at Mr. Lee’s request. End Update.]

The guard posts are the most distinctive feature of the North Korean camps to a Google-Earther. Here, for example, are Camp 14 (left) and Camp 18 (right), near the town of Sunchon …

I first posted pictures of Camp 16 (below, left) here. It’s near North Korea’s nuclear and missile testing ranges. Camp 15 (below, right) near the town of Yodok, became infamous after survivor Kang Chol Hwan described it in “The Aquariums of Pyongyang.”

[Former child prisoner and author Kang Chol Hwan describes how prisoners were forced to stone each other to death at Camp 15. 1:01]
[Source: Discovery Channel, “Children of the Secret State“]

You can’t help but think that some of these places would be beautiful if their stories were less sad. Camp 16, according to “The Hidden Gulag,” is a place of exile for families of the condemned. In North Korea’s Confucian society, in which every word of the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung is worshipped as holy scripture, the regime strictly obeys his order to root out class enemies for three generations. That’s why North Korea doesn’t just arrest the person who sings a South Korean pop song or makes an unguarded remark about the food supply. It arrests that person’s husband or wife, parents, and children, too.

One unforgettable image, there were two girls and they were trying to take out a piece of noodle from one polluted water pond where they put the garbage. And one guard kicked the kids into the small pond, and they drowned. The pond was very deep, and I felt really sad about that.

Ahn reports that of the 1,500 to 2,000 prisoners who died each year from malnutrition alone, most were kids. This figure does not include deaths from disease, torture, execution, or from the casual murders he recollects:

I saw numerous prisoners killed, especially by beating. I saw one person age between 40 and 50 — he’s old enough because the average age of prisoner is between 40-50 — he was working in brick factory. And as he was older he was moving slowly, he was not working well. And the team master tramped on his loin, and the bone was broken. He was hit by an iron rod that is used to start vehicle engines, and I heard the next day he died.

For others, death is a gradual process of human breakage and dismemberment:

At that time the tunnel was passing near the pig pen of the camp, and about 500 political prisoners were participating and there was one female named Han Jin Duk, 26 years old. I was in charge of giving food to the pigs. And my supervisor, when he saw the woman, she was beautiful. And he raped her, and he was found by the watchman officer. And he was investigated. My superior, his rank was reduced and the woman was sent to the detention center And then I didn’t see her for one year.

One day I was going to the place to load the coal, I met her. And I noticed she was exactly that woman, and I asked her, how you could survive. And she told me, that yes, I survived. But she showed me her body, and it was all burned by fire.

After six months I met her at the corn storage in Kusan district and found her putting on a used tire on her knees because her legs were cut off. Because of a coal mine wagon ran over her knees. And all she could do now was separate the corn grains from the cob.

Two of Camp 22’s gates are visible from the air. Looking closely at this gate, the southernmost of the two (below, left), you can actually see a group of people standing in the courtyard, and another behind one of the buildings. Are these guards? Or is this a new crop of prisoners being brought in? Further north is the main gate (below, right), which lies on the road to the town of Hoeryong.

Just a few meters from the gate is the place through which trains enter and leave Camp 22, carrying coal from the Chungbong Coal Mine inside the camp to the power plant at Chongjin and the steel mill at Kimchaek. Here you can see another guardpost, and a curious catwalk over the tracks. This, I speculate, is to allow guards to make sure that no prisoner can hide inside any of the coal cars.

Following the tracks west, I even found one of the coal trains.

This is the Chungbong Coal Mine, inside the camp. If you compare the image on the left to the previously published one on the right, there isn’t much doubt that it’s the same one the witnesses identified to David Hawk, who published this photograph of the mine with his report.

Closer in, we can see the mine in more detail: a row of hand-cars just outside the tunnel entrance, and piles of mine timbers. The resolution is even good enough for us to see oxcarts passing each other on the road south of the mine. In other places, you can even see individual people walking on the road. The oxcarts give some idea of the size of the huts in which the prisoners live.

My image of a concentration camp’s housing is of neat rows of barracks like this. When I first saw the satellite photos of Camp 22, they were not what I expected. From the air, it could almost be any ordinary village or neighborhood, but for the fence that surrounds it, and for the reports of the witnesses. Prisoners, some of them with their families, mostly live in small huts.

As with most of North Korea’s labor camps, housing is clustered in fairly small groups. Many other prisoners are housed in much smaller villages, like these:

There’s really no telling why North Korea houses its prisoners this way, but it makes sense from the perspective of cold logic. As even the Nazis learned, camps are more secure if they’re less concentrated. Two dozen prisoners in a small village present much less of a threat of rebellion than, say, the large group of prisoners who rose up in the Onsong Camp in 1997. The uprising ended with 5,000 dead, and Kim Jong Il reportedly ordered every trace of the place scraped off the face of the earth. It’s easier to guess why prisoners are housed in huts; the camps’ main method of control is to keep inmates on the verge of starvation and extend them small rewards for informing on each other. That, and the hut-style housing, limit the opportunities to think unauthorized thoughts.

[Kwon Hyuk describes torturing and killing entire families at Camp 22 as punishment for the infractions of one family member or neighbor. 1:18]
[Source: BBC, “Access to Evil”]

Where, you may wonder, are the bodies buried? Ahn Myong Chol answers:

Not only here but all other places, even in the small hills they bury bodies. And when we cut the trees down, sometimes we find a buried body. Not only here, but all around here are buried bodies.

In the hills here, if there is some flat area, it is covered with graves. And if people start to farm there, they find bodies or bones.

Ahn doesn’t describe a specific location, but if you look at the thinly wooded hills around the housing areas, that’s where they’re probably buried. All I can make is an educated guess, but I’ll guess that this hill is a likely site.

I called my guess “educated:” traditionally, Koreans bury their dead in round graves on high places. Relatives care for the graves of their loved ones. Proper Korean graves are covered with carefully trimmed grass. Clearly, proper burials are not always possible at Camp 22, but if you look closely at this hill, which sits just next to the larger housing area pictured above, you can actually make out a few light, round patches of disturbed earth.

[Ahn Myong Chol tells about North Korea’s killing fields, and how mutilated bodies were left to decompose in the woods. 1:58]
[Sources: Discovery Channel, “Children of the Secret State”; National Geographic Channel, “Inside North Korea“]

I served in South Korea with the U.S. Army for four years, from 1998 to 2002. As I was serving in Korea, more survivors of the camps began to describe the conditions there. We already heard about the completely preventable famine that killed about 2 million North Koreans while Kim Jong Il built a nuclear arsenal and bought artillery, submarines, missiles, and MiG’s. For the soldiers, in a way, none of this really mattered much. Most soldiers tend to be fairly apolitical. For those who kept up with the reports, it only reinforced what we knew, but could not really change, about the brutality of life inside North Korea. What struck me more was why South Koreans didn’t care. This comment on my blog typifies the mixture of denial and justification so many South Koreans, especially the young, applied to the horrors in the North. It’s a wierd witch’s brew of nationalism and socialism that, in its various forms, periodically incinerates lives by the millions.

Just after I left Korea, while I was still on active duty, I read two reports that haunt me to this day. One was this BBC report, citing the accounts of multiple survivors, that North Korea kills the babies of refugee women China forcibly repatriates:

One woman told of being forced to assist injection-induced labours and then watching as a baby was suffocated with a wet towel in front of its mother. Many former prisoners told of babies buried alive or left face down on the ground to die. They were told by guards this was to prevent the survival of half-Chinese babies. If fleeing North Koreans are discovered by Chinese police, they are almost always returned home.

None of this was enough to interfere with China scoring the 2008 Olympics, or with its favorable trade relations.

At the time I read this, my son, who is half Korean, was two months old. It was one of two times in my adult life I can recall having broken down and wept. The other was when I read this:

‘I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,’ he said. ‘The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.’

Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: ‘The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.’

‘It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.’ [The Guardian]

According to the “scientist” who claims to have participed it, this also happened at Camp 22.

There are no high-resolution images of the camp’s administration areas, where this is most likely to have happened, but “The Hidden Gulag” published this photo.

You can see photos of the camp’s North and South sections, where are beyond the Google Earth coverage, here and here. The gas chamber reports were the basis of the BBC Television Documentary “Access to Evil.” They are not the only reports about Camp 22 that evoke the legacy of Josef Mengele. In March 2004, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote an op-ed for the Singapore Straits Times that cited the reports of a former engineer at the camp, Kang Byong Sop. Kang claimed that “political prisoners were trucked in twice a week for experiments,” and said that he saw “human hands scratching a round glass window inside a chamber that was locked with a heavy metal door.” Cooper called on North Korea to allow international inspections of Camp 22. Failing that, he did the next best thing; he flew to Seoul to interview the witnesses.

Since then, another report, attributed to British intelligence sources and published in the arch-conservative World Net Daily, made an equally horrific accusation.

“Hundreds of prisoners die there each week, the victims of biological or chemical experiments to test out [chemical and biological] weapons for North Korea’s CBW arsenal,” claims an MI6 report.

In one intelligence file is the allegation that newborn babies are taken from their mothers and injected with biological agents or given injections of chemicals that blister the skin, leaving huge keloids, the sores seen on the bodies of Hiroshima victims.

The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea believes that 400,000 people have died in North Korea’s labor camps during the last three decades. Just for comparison, Cleveland, Oakland, Omaha, and Toulouse each have just over 400,000 people. There are still an estimated 200,000 people in the camps today.

There is no way to know for certain how many of these reports are true. Kim Jong Il’s regime won’t let anyone visit the camps, except for those who go there to die. The regime denies that the camps even exist. Neither the Red Cross, nor aid workers with the World Food Program, nor the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in North Korea has been let anywhere near the place. Human rights organizations go through the motions of publishing occasional reports criticizing the regime’s human rights record, but their few calls to inspect or close the camps attract little media attention.

Not a single government or international institution has been willing or able to confront the horrors of Camp 22. In 2004, Congress unanimously passed this law, which includes a “sense of Congress” resolution that the United States should make an issue of human rights in its dealings with North Korea. No evidence suggests that the Administration’s diplomats ever even brought the issue up. They also ignored a law requiring U.S. embassies and consulates in places like China, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam to take in North Koreans who often go that far to escape their homeland.

On February 14th of this year, the U.S., South Korea, Japan, and Russia signed a deal with North Korea that aspires to remove it from the “terrorism” list, return to normal trade relations, and even full diplomatic relations. Some would say this is the only way to change North Korea, but it’s been tried. South Korea poured $7 billion in aid into the North over the last ten years. Kim Jong Il spent the money on weapons, millions of ordinary North Koreans starved, and Kim Jong Il never been more ruthless or better armed. Nothing in the agreement or the statements of the parties offers so much as a word of hope to the people in Camp 22, who will probably never hear of it. They will probably end up as forgotten and buried inconveniences.

U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan recently apologized for doing nothing while 800,000 Rwandans were murdered. Meanwhile, the killing went on at Camp 22. Neither Annan, nor his High Commissioner for Human Rights, nor his High Commissioner for Refugees said or did much of anything. The world has forgotten the North Korean people … at least the ones without nuclear weapons. Annan’s successor, Ban Ki Moon, built his career as South Korea’s Foreign Minister by ignoring North Korean atrocities.

The media have also failed to tell this story. The few reporters who go to North Korea seldom venture far from the capital, Pyongyang. When they do go, Internal Security Bureau minders drive them all along pretty much the same circuit of palaces, tombs, and monuments. None ever gets within miles of Camp 22, and few ask. Still, they bring us back footage of tombs and monuments and strident quotes from their minders and tell us how much more we now know about North Korea than we did before. Until the international media decides to cover the story of Camp 22, it will remain out of sight and out of mind. Now you know the story, but you’ll continue to be one of the few.

Thank you for taking a few minutes to give a thought to the people who live and die in Camp 22. Your thoughts and mine will not save them, of course, but it’s almost too much to imagine that thousands of human beings would die there without anyone mourning them, for in Camp 22, even mourning the dead is forbidden.

Update 10/2012: According to this report in the Daily NK and this Korean-language report from Radio Free Asia, Camp 22 was shut down in the spring of 2012. The RFA report adds the chilling detail that most of the population was starved and disposed of in a crematorium first. Unwilling to speculate about anything this important, I decided to purchase new satellite imagery with the help of two readers of this site. The imagery, which was taken in October 2012 by Astrium Geo, does not corroborate these reports and suggests that Camp 22 continues on, day by day, with the same terrible work it has done for years. Unfortunately, the end-user license agreement provides me very few rights to publish that imagery here.

Update 9/2013, Camp 22 (probably) closed; most prisoners feared dead: Despite the inconsistencies noted above, the evidence now leads to the conclusion that Camp 22 was indeed closed. The focus now shifts to the fate of the prisoners, most of whom are now feared dead:

South Korean news outlets that employ defectors and maintain sources in the North reported last year that the North had shuttered Camp 22. Satellite images showed razed or abandoned guard towers and interrogation facilities. But it remains unclear what happened to the prisoners, estimated several years ago to number 30,000. Hawk’s report cited unconfirmed reports from defectors that between 7,000 to 8,000 were transferred. Hawk cited another defector who reported a massive famine in the camp beginning in 2010 after poor food harvests in the region.

“If even remotely accurate, this is an atrocity requiring much closer investigation,” he wrote. [Washington Post]

Residents of nearby Hoeryong report that as the camp was closed for good, the authorities imposed a curfew, and thousands of prisoners were loaded onto trains in the middle of the night and sent away. Camp 16 was mentioned as one possible destination, but recent imagery of that camp shows no evidence of new housing to hold a significant number of new prisoners. Camps 14 and 25 have been expanded recently, but probably not enough to hold tens of thousands of people. The Post‘s editorial board writes:

In a way, the camp was a city in its own right, albeit a locus of inhumanity rather than a bustling metropolis. Camp 22 was one point in North Korea’s constellation of concentration camps that run on unadulterated cruelty, a secret world where prisoners are fed poison for experimentation, women are forced to kill their own children and entire families are murdered in gas chambers.

As the world sits by, North Korea has imprisoned as many as 200,000 people in these camps. Although human rights violations remain unfortunately common in many nations, these camps form a category of their own in today’s world. North Korea’s gulag is a place where people aren’t people but rather objects for exploitation and elimination.

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea released a report this week detailing the harrowing reality of Camp 22. Satellite imagery suggests the camp recently closed. Good news? Not exactly. According to the report, after a food shortage in 2009-10, Camp 22’s population shrunk to somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 people from around 30,000 in previous years. Thousands of prisoners seem to have evaporated into thin air — perhaps via Camp 22’s crematoria. [Editorial, Washington Post]

And now, the world has failed them for the last time. Some day, Ban Ki Moon will go to the place he has once so diligently ignored to apologize to the bones of the dead. (Posthumous salvation is a new ritual for failed U.N. bureaucrats; they go to places like Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Darfur to seek the forgiveness of spirits and gods in which they don’t quite believe.) Samantha Power, safely protected from culpability by the late start of her tenure, will make speeches about it.

I have been trying to see what it would take to organize an awareness concert in South Korea for the families and victims of these terrible atrocities. Much like “Free Tibet” and other freedom concerts with big headliners that the media surely follows, it’s something that has made me wonder if something can be done to better bring this to the world’s attention. For all the talk we do in the Western World of change and peace, we do little to even bring awareness to such things.

If anyone has any information as to who to best contact, as I have gotten nowhere, please email me at justin@audiosocket.com. I would be my hope to see if even the smallest bit of awareness can be given to the lost lives, the pain and the devastation that have come to define the forgotten people of North Korea.

WOW! this is just really scary. I hope Kim Jong il’s son (the next heir) fixes up North Korea. I really really hope he doesnt continue on this hell, North Korean weapons are the problem to there starvation. They should really care for there people instead of camping the ones that dont “think” like there forced too.

I am speechless after coming upon such atrocities in N Korea – Prayer and an united front. I will not forget, I will not ignore. How desensitized mankind is anymore…where is the love, where is the hope? I recently heard a song that I have made my prayer…’make my heart break for the things that break Yours God.’ Broken I am for these people and my heart weeps.

I am shocked after reading this article and watching the videos. I have to admit that I didn`t even know 10% of what was going on there until I read your article. I have been living 3 month in a share house in australia with some really cool people from soth korea and I bet even they didn`t know everything. At least they didn`t tell me much about the conflict. Hope this will all get better in the future!

Look, before we take any action, you gave to bring proof of your findings. WRITE DOWN THE EXACT LATITUDES AND LONGITUDES OF THE GOD DAMN PLACE! People will never take thhis seriously enough until they see it themselves. I searched but I didn’t find anything and I’m starting to doubt your claims. I followed the coordinates in one of your maps and didn’t find the same thing. all the housing in the area looks similar. So please, write coordinates to one of the main structures so that I can see it myself. thank you!

“Doubt is the chastity of the mind”, it’s been said. Evil regimes do commit soul-searing horrors, but defectors do exaggerate.

In the case of “experimentation” on prisoners, there is now documentary evidence. The BBC talked to a human rights activist who received copies of paperwork ordering the transfer of prisoners to be used for chemical warfare experiments. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEUjUJqSxww

The BBC did objective fact-checking. The documents are on low-quality paper, as you’d expect from the DPRK but not from a forgery. They carry official government seals. The BBC showed them to an independent North Korea expert who said they seemed authentic.

The clincher is that, without telling Kwon Hyuk that they had the documents, the BBC asked what kind of paperwork if any came with the victims. What he described matched what the BBC saw.

It’s tempting to daydream that if the US can carry someone out of Pakistan without the government’s knowledge or permission, that they could land helicopters in Camp 22 and say “Come with me if you want to live”. The Kims have seemed especially afraid of having the gulag exposed. A raid on them would attract so much publicity that the firsthand accounts of the inmates would be widely publicized, not overlooked as they are now.

The death of Kim Jong Il will continue to make people curious about North Korea and the obvious brain washing of it’s citizens that we witnessed in videos and pictures following his death.
After seeing “Kimjongilia” on the Documentary Channel last night I’ve been reading everything I can find online, and I’ll definately be sharing this with my friends.
Don’t give up hope, I for one believe they’re on the verge of a very major change for the better.

[…] shipped elsewhere. For those that haven’t read about Camp 22 I recommend going over to One Free Korea’s site to do so. Also OFK has a posting up as well that discusses whether the closing of Camp 22 is […]

[…] of horrible atrocities that are committed against the country's own citizens. In the infamous Camp-22, one former guard estimated that 1500-2000 people died each year. The people also do not have […]

Rev. Schuyler, the reason the USA can’t do anything is, unfortunately, simple. If American troops just storm in there as they please, North Korea gets the message that they can do the same on American soil. I think that the lack of action is to protect the lives of Americans.

This is just my two cents, the way we should help the North Koreans is by arming them. Start a full on insurrection, and supply the people the necessary tools to topple this regime. Use the South Korean boarder to funnel weapons and stage guerrilla style attacks. If that is successful broaden your methods, win their hearts and minds by feeding them. Make it a two pronged attack, with total economic sanctions, while setting up a new government. Send the message out that those that defect from the regime will be forgiven, full pardon. Hopefully that will rot it from within, hell you could offer rewards for defectors that cause maximum damage from within. We will say to the tune of 1 million USD, that would make them richer than their wildest dreams.

I can’t believe how little I knew about North Korea until the last few years. When I was in the Army in the 90s I knew soldiers who were stationed in South Korea, but I was not aware of how cut off the North Koreans are from the world and I certainly didn’t know about the horrible famine in the 90s. I just wish we could oust this entire regime without going to war but that is not going to happen. Hard to believe societies like NK still exist- pretty much a modern day Holocaust. I feel so sorry for everyone in these camps, especially the children who likely don’t even know why they’re there- sooo ridiculous. Punishing 3 generations for stupid, petty stuff. This is all one reason no one should support any type of Communism. It is pure evil.

Once again an article full of propaganda targeted against the Juche belief and DPRK’s sovereign right to remain independent and to refuse to be dictated by destructive Western capitalism. DPRK’s system, which encourages three generations of punishment is a genious one; vengeful relatives would only cause further disturbance with their criminal ideologies. Re-education is the key word. There is no “Holocaust”, no executions AT ALL in North Korean prisons except for very, very serious crimes. All information in this article comes from people who have illegally fled their lawful sentences and are obviously just unpatriotic. The defectors that you’re so eager to listen to are by international standards considered traitors and criminals who have every reason to lie and can provide no evidence whatsoever to back up their frivolous accusations.

Before I read this article, i knew that North Korea was bad and all but this just opened my eyes big time. If only other people would see how really terrible it is. If only we could put a stop to all of that.

I don’t think some of the Images are prisons… a lot of speculation… while I see one area that looks like a graveyard I also see a coal mine which looks active… and industrial housing developments… Too much theory… We spend almost 10 years looking at satellite imagery… could fool the masses… but we not 50% convinced…

How can we as americans stand back and allow something like this to happen, it fucking sickens me, if this is truely going on and no one is doing anything about it then damn us to hell, were just as sick and guilty as they are, and dont give me the united nations law bullshit, think about it, what if that was our kids and families being starved and tortured, these are fucking HUMAN BEINGS over there, nothing in the fucking world should be more important of a priority than this, if we do nothing to stop this our country is nothing more than a cess pool pile of shit and we will never be forgivin so dont even bother praying

I’m doing a persuasive speech for my Comm class on petitioning china to stop repatriating north korean immigrants and I can honestly say I have never been so disturbed and concerned in my entire life. No one knows how serious this is it really seems like the US is brushing over the seriousness of this problem. Not only the US, but other countries as well. We need this kind of information to be more widely known so we can do something about it. This site is really helpful and I thank whoever created it.

Just a thought of course, but instead of blaming your country you should probably start by addressing yourself too. There are huge reasons why the UN do not invade North Korea, just as the same reason why the Russians, the Chinese and the Japanese don’t. However, regardless of this, are you the kind of person who goes without luxury for a lifetime to donate to countries far worse off than yourself? We’re all to blame, we love our lives of luxury and we’ll always put ourselves first before we put those who really need it. Perhaps you should take all your annual leave, live on budget, save all your profits and travel to countries less developed and give aid, be supportive and as you put it, they’re HUMAN BEINGS – NOTHING SHOULD BE PUT FIRST, so go and do it. Or wait, do your luxuries come first all of a sudden. We all like a rant dude, but you have to look deep within before you can call others.

what ever happened the adage, in reference to the Holocaust, “never again?” and yet 60 years later, here we are, fully aware and nobody says nothing, does nothing. Not our problem? complacency is what breeds this kind of evil.